Monument Valley is more a part of everyone’s life than they would ever expected to be. If you’re a person who has enjoyed movies over the course of the last 50 years, you’ve probably been exposed to Monument Valley in one form or another. Directors for movies generally will utilize this area for one of two different meanings. The most obvious is as the background for epic spaghetti westerns in order to illustrate the landscape of the old west. Monument Valley portrays the incredibly large open spaces of the desert with the towering buttes in the distance, providing no real shelter but serving as features that provides scale to yourself against the area. Essentially, standing in Monument Valley makes you feel small, and illustrates that you’re just a portion of the world that will continue long after you’re gone. Another way that Monument Valley is often used in cinema is to have it has the background to illustrate desolation. In movies like Forest Gump, it is used as the background to show how far you would have to go to reach even a single area in the distance. Without the monuments of the area, you would only have wide open desert and ultimately would not have the type of scale that would illustrate just how far it is to get there. Whether it is to illustrate loneliness and isolation or to illustrate the beauty of America as in movies like Easy Rider, Monument Valley is the perfect backdrop for almost all of that.
Monument Valley itself as part of Navajo nation and lies within a region of the Colorado Plateau that is characterized by a cluster of immense sandstone buttes. The largest of these structures is over 1000 feet high from the valley floor. The area itself is accessible from U.S. highway 163 and is within the reservation land that is owned by Navajo nation. It is at the Utah and Arizona border and is very close to the four corners area, where four states all come together. The area itself boasts typical desert weather of extremely hot summers and cold winters, but the elevation will generally temper the extreme temperatures. A rarely goes below freezing or above 100°at any time of the year. The majority of days will be hovering within a range that is not uncomfortable, and during the summer there are roughly 50 or so days that are around 90°. Due to the fact but it is located in open desert the temperatures drop quickly once the sun has set. This will usually mean if you’re exploring the area you will need a jacket night. The area does have a pay portion that will allow access to several areas like mystery valley and hunts mesa. Many people will simply enjoy the view from the road leading up to the area, which is often used as a visual presentation of the open desert. No matter what, Monument Valley is worth the trip.